Assignment Scenario: Due to complaints about ethics in your department, your supervisor has asked you to lead a meeting on business ethics; moreover, she has asked you to have all of your employees read George Bragues’s “Business is One Thing, Ethics is Another: Revisiting Bernard Mandeville’s The Fable of the Bees.”
As your departmental meeting approaches, you receive many complaints from employees who don’t understand why you’re having them read this journal article; therefore, you are going to write a memo, addressed to the employees of your department (make that part up) that explains the relevance and importance of Bragues’s article. In your memo, you want to stress what you find to be the most important aspects of the article: What information, in this article, is useful to your department? Furthermore, you will probably want to reference some specific passages in the article (with quotations, paraphrases, and appropriate page references) that will help illustrate to your employees the points you want to make.
Assignment Details: The goal here is for you to communicate clearly and directly in the form of a memo. Your assignment should be set up as a memo (see pages 891-92 of The St. Martin’s Handbook, 6th edition for more information on this mode of writing). Your memo should highlight key points from Bragues’s article and be written in a focused and cohesive manner. Finally, your memo should be no longer than 1 page single-spaced; you have a limited amount of space to work with here, so be selective in what information you want to include.
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